Roadside Crosses

security chief Henry Bascomb, Dance’s father and . . . Edie Dance. They were engaged in a discussion and were looking over documents on the table before them.
    Stuart glanced up and smiled, gesturing with an index figure, meaning, Dance guessed, they’d only be a moment or two. Her mother glanced her way andthen, expression neutral, returned her attention to the hospital director.
    “Hi,” a man’s voice said from behind her.
    She turned, blinking in surprise to see Michael O’Neil.
    “Michael, what’s going on?” Dance asked breathlessly.
    With furrowed brows, he asked, “Didn’t you get the message?”
    “Just the text from Dad that they were here.”
    “I didn’t want to bother you in the middle of an operation. I spoke to Overby and gave him the details. He was supposed to call when you were finished.”
    Oh. Well, this was one glitch she couldn’t lay at the feet of her thoughtless boss; she’d been in such a hurry to get to the arraignment, she’d never told him they’d wrapped the Chilton take-down.
    “I heard Hollister went okay.”
    “Yeah, everybody’s fine. Chilton’s in custody. Travis’s got a banged head. That’s it.” But the Roadside Cross Case was far from her mind. She stared into the cafeteria. “What’s going on, Michael?”
    “The charges against your mother’ve been dropped,” he said.
    “What?”
    O’Neil hesitated, looking almost sheepish, and then said, “I didn’t tell you, Kathryn. I couldn’t.”
    “Tell me what?”
    “The case I’ve been working on?”
    The Other Case . . .
    “It had nothing to do with the container situation. That’s still on hold. I took on your mother’s case as an independent investigation. I told the sheriff I wasgoing to do it. Pretty much insisted. He agreed. Stopping Harper now was our only chance. If he’d gotten a conviction . . . well, you know the odds of getting a verdict overturned on appeal.”
    “You never said anything.”
    “That was the plan. I could run it but I couldn’t mention anything to you. I had to be able to testify that you knew nothing about what I was doing. Conflict of interest, otherwise. Even your parents didn’t know. I talked to them about the case, but only informally. They never suspected.”
    “Michael.” Dance again felt rare tears sting. She gripped his arm and their eyes met, brown on green.
    He said, frowning, “I knew she wasn’t guilty. Edie taking somebody’s life? Crazy.” He grinned. “You notice I’ve been talking to you in text messages a lot lately, emails?”
    “Right.”
    “Because I couldn’t lie to you in person. I knew you’d spot it in a minute.”
    She laughed, recalling how vague he’d been about the Container Case.
    “But who killed Juan?”
    “Daniel Pell.”
    “Pell?” she whispered in astonishment.
    O’Neil explained, though, that it wasn’t Pell himself who’d killed Juan Millar, but one of the women connected with him—the partner that Dance had been thinking of yesterday as she’d driven her children to see their grandparents.
    “She knew the threat you presented, Kathryn. She wanted desperately to stop you.”
    “Why did you think of her?”
    “Process of elimination,” O’Neil explained. “I knew your mother couldn’t ’ve done it. I knew Julio Millar hadn’t—he was accounted for the whole time. His parents weren’t there, and there were no other fellow officers present. So I asked who’d have a motive to blame your mother for the death? Pell came to mind. You were running the manhunt to find him and getting closer. Your mother’s arrest would distract you, if not force you off the case altogether. He couldn’t do it himself, so he used his partner.”
    He explained that the woman had slipped into the hospital by pretending to be applying for a job as a nurse.
    “The job applications,” Dance said, nodding, recalling what Connie’s investigation had found. “There wasn’t any connection between them and Millar, though, so we didn’t pay any attention.”
    “Witnesses said that she was wearing a nurse’s uniform. As if she’d just gotten off a shift at another hospital and had come over to MBH to apply for a job.” The deputy continued, “I had her computer examined and found that she’d searched for drug interactions on Google.”
    “The evidence in the garage?”
    “She planted it. I had Pete Bennington take the garage apart. A CS team found some hairs—that Harper’s people had missed, by the